All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them.
There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank.
99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date.
Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery.
Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.
Maybe we need some type of credit system that takes the health of the battery into account.
For example, if you have a new battery you also have 1000 credits. If you swap it for an older battery (which is worth, say, 500 credits), you'll have a battery and 500 credits in your account. Next time if you get a newer battery which is worth 800 credits, you'll have only 200 credits left in your account.
Also those credits could decrease as you use batteries. You could replenish them with payments.
Sure, a credit based system or some kind of "remaining miles" calculation would work, I think. Personally I would prefer just pay for what you use with interchangeable systems, but we'll only get that if governments step in to prevent "ecosystem" style rent-seeking where every battery is incompatible with every other battery.
We know battery capacity decreases with age and number of recharge cycles. There's randomness due to how hard the battery was used, temperature, manufacturing defects, but you could make an estimate about "miles remaining" and charge for that.
Then when you visit the self-service battery kiosk, you can can select "40 miles" or "30 miles" or "27 miles" (etc.) from a list of options. Pick one and the corresponding set of batteries lights up. Maybe the kiosks already do something like this? I've not seen one in real life yet.
All propane tanks around here have a "do not refill past this date" stamped into them.
There are 2 ways of "refilling" a tank -- the first is to swap your tank for another tank that's filled; the other is to go to a place that can refill your tank.
99% of the time when I do the tank swap they try to give me one with an expiration date that's coming up in the next 6 months. I almost never am offered one with a very long expiration date.
Do you really think that, in a situation where you own your car and battery, you'll reliably get a battery that's as good or better than the one that's in your car? Keep in mind the value of the vehicle is 40-80% tied up in _only_ the battery.
Battery swaps aren't a realistic plan unless someone else owns the battery, and then you'll get all sorts of other nonsense in the ecosystem.